Article suitable for older students

Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico goes west...

15th May 2024

Kingsborough’s {italicAntiquities of Mexico} goes west...

Set of Kingsoborough’s ‘Antiquities of Mexico’

‘Y nosotros en México, apenas si conocemos la vida y la obra de este benefactor, que insistimos, a cambio de su vida y su dinero nos legó tan extraordinaria obra. ¿No es de justicia levantarle un monumento, o poner su nombre a alguna escuela, biblioteca, o calle de México?’ (Victor Ruiz Meza, ‘Kingsborough, Benefactor de México’, Excelsior 8/7/54). (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore).

Admiration for Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico came swiftly and in generous measure. In William Prescott’s words ‘He has brought together a most rich collection of unpublished materials to illustrate the Aztec, and, in a wider sense, American antiquities; and that, by this munificent undertaking, which no government, probably would have, and few individuals could have executed, he has entitled himself to the lasting gratitude of every friend of science’ (1922: 73).

The praise for his monumental work continues to this day: leading Maya archaeologist Professor David Friedel calls the tomes ‘the holy grail of bibliophiles in Mesoamerican studies’ (Staller, 2015, personal communication). It’s worth emphasising that the first half of the nineteenth century, when Antiquities was published, was a period of ‘Europe’s first sustained encounter with many forms of nonalphabetic writing, including Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mexican pictographs’ (Tomlinson, 2007: 11), and the rich content of the volumes was, at the time of publication, almost entirely unknown, anywhere in the world.

The huge cost of the set made acquisition on both sides of the Atlantic limited to a very lucky few. Two or three years after publication Prescott was still ‘daily expecting from Europe… the magnificent works of Lord Kingsborough. There is not a copy, I believe, in the United States’ (Stuart & Stuart, 2008: 250). He wasn’t to be disappointed: he wrote in a letter to Washington Irving that he was, by 1838, the proud owner of seven volumes (from George Ticknor Life of William Hickling Prescott, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1863, pp 157-8 – Ward, 2015, personal communication).

There were significant interested parties simultaneously in Mexico, at a time when ‘in the twilight of Spanish rule, criollo scholars had seized upon the antiquities of Mesoamerica as a point of cultural distinction from their Spanish countrymen’ (Tripp Evans 2004: 47). President Santa Anna had instructed his foreign minister Lucas Alaman to buy, amongst other weighty tomes, 12 sets of the Dupaix Antiquitées Mexicaines in Europe (Villela, 2015, personal communication); the beautifully illustrated works of Dupaix, von Humboldt, Del Río, Waldeck and others were prohibitively expensive, but word of their publication spread rapidly...

... and it’s highly likely that that there were several copies of Kingsborough in Mexico ‘two or three years after its appearance in London’ (López Luján, 2015, personal communication) – for example, on the shelves of the famous historical bookshop of Luis Abadiano y Valdés, later to be bought in its entirety by Adolph Sutro. Kingsborough himself was patron to Jean-Frédéric Waldeck (who even named a pyramid at Uxmal in Kingsborough’s name). They had met in London, and Kingsborough subsidised the artist’s mission to Yucatan (Tripp Evans: 40).

Indeed, there is an undated scrawled note from Kingsborough in the British Library (catalogued just as ‘aft. 1830’) at the front of his ‘Inventory of MSS and paintings which Boturini left behind him in Mexico’ which reads: ‘Mr Waldeck may by the assistance of this catalogue and by making use of my name should he pass through Mexico, since I presented a copy of my Antiquities to the public library of that city and I think some of the literary men may wish to oblige me, be able to collect some portion of the scattered MSS of Boturini’s collection. Kingsborough’ (emphasis added).
It was Waldeck’s 1822 illustrations of Antonio del Río’s report of lost Mayan cities that inspired Catherwood and Stephens to set off to the Yucatan in 1839.

A small number of key institutions in the United States were to acquire early sets of Antiquities through the largesse of wealthy individuals: the American Philosophical Society (possibly from Joel Poinsett, the first US Minister to Mexico, where he was a keen collector in the 1820s, or from Henry M. Phillips); the American Antiquarian Society (their set purchased by eminent Mexican archaeologist Ignacio Bernal); William Prescott asked Obadiah Rich (the US diplomat and bibliophile who we met in Chapter 1) to get him a copy to give to the Boston Athenaeum; a 7-volume set owned by the Library Company of Philadelphia is believed to be a donation received in 1838. The University of Pennsylvania set was gifted by Robert Haysham Sayre (possibly by Fairman Rogers Furness prior to him).

Wealthy individuals who collected rare books mid-century included John Carter Brown, James Lenox, George Tickner, Adolph Sutro (said to have owned ‘the finest private library in America’), George Bancroft… the latter had a huge collection, specialising in California and Mexico – ‘At ten thousand volumes Bancroft thought he was done. “I have rifled America of its treasures; Europe I have ransacked”’ (Basbanes, 1995: 171) – he then had his attention drawn to Mexico, with its long publishing tradition: ‘”One would think, perhaps, that in Mexico there might be a rich harvest”’. Bancroft went on to buy up lots from rare book auctions in Mexico. In 1880 Henry Stevens handled Bancroft’s bids at the London sale of material gathered by the late Don José Fernando Ramírez, who at one time was head of the National Museum of Mexico.

Nevertheless, the number of Kingsborough sets in the United States could more or less be counted on the fingers of both hands towards the close of the 19th century: in a newspaper article (Wisconsin State Journal 14 Dec 1886) written by David Atwood we read: ‘There are not over nine or ten sets of Kingsborough, coloured or uncoloured, now in America, and they only in the largest eastern libraries, and it is exceedingly rare that one of either variety comes to be offered for sale, while the market price for such is $600…’
Rare book specialists in the United States today corroborate this picture. According to David Szewczyk of Philadelphia Rare Books, for instance, ‘In America in the 19th century the market for books like the Kingsborough was slim. Of the copies now in the U.S. I would guess that 95% of them arrived here after 1900… The available copies to scholars in the period 1840-1875 would have been a small, small number, and they would have been in the Atlantic states: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut (perhaps), New York, Pennsylvania…’ Anything west of Ohio would have been after 1900 (2015, personal communication).

In 1842 the American Ethnological Society was formed in New York City by Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett to encourage research in the emerging field of ethnology. The oldest professional anthropological organisation in the USA, it was composed of a group of like-minded individuals who held discussion meetings in their own homes. ‘The earliest papers presented at Society meetings were attentive to matters of mapping, antiquities, Biblical history, and travel, as well as to issues more readily characterized as physical anthropology and ethnology’ (americanethnologist.org). Almost certainly this circle would have had a Kingsborough set as well (Villela, 2015, personal communication).

Four years later, in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was established and, following years of internal rifts and declining influence of the AES, in 1879 the Bureau of American Ethnology was formed. Its founding director was John Wesley Powell (aged 47, he was the most powerful scientist in the country; he went on in 1888 to help found the National Geographical Society). BAE staff included ‘some of America’s earliest field anthropologists’, including Frank Hamilton Cushing and Alice Cunningham Fletcher… The BAE supported the research of Franz Boas and Cyrus Thomas, whose influential work we introduce below.

Also in 1879 a library for the US Geological Survey (USGS) was authorised, being formally established in 1882, beginning with a staff of three and a collection of 1,400 books. Early gifts came from Major John Wesley Powell (who was joint Director) and the family of Dr. Isaac Lea (a leading Philadelphia publisher, member of the APS and President of the AANS and of the AAAS). Through its Gift Exchange Program the USGS donated a Kingsborough set to the BAE in 1894 (vol. III – containing a reproduction of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer - was accessioned in 1895, full of notes and pencil marks).

In his study ‘Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts’ in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1884) the BAE and USGS archaeologist Professor Cyrus Thomas refers to the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer with accompanying drawings – as far as I can ascertain this is the first time specific elements of the Codex are referenced in published scholarship. Sadly he makes no mention of where he saw it, though cryptically Powell, in his introduction to Thomas’s article, writes ‘Proper materials for this study have only recently been obtained’ (p. xxx).

Thomas presents ‘strong evidence of a common origin of the Mexican and Central American calendars’ (p23), comparing ‘Plate 44’ of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (actually Plate 1 – it was wrongly numbered 44 by Kingsborough) to that from the Maya ‘Codex Cortesianus’ (now known as the Madrid Codex), suggesting they share the ‘same plan and same purpose’. He reproduces ‘Plate 44’ on p33 of the Report, adding a ‘schema’ of it on p. 35. He rightly deduces that the Codex is read anti-clockwise (p34 – and ‘around to the left, opposite the course of the sun’, p61). Thomas also reproduces a ‘Calendar Wheel from Duran’ (p45) as part of his study of the sequence of day signs, and cardinal points, correctly placing East at the top.

In his conclusion (p59) Thomas writes: ‘The Cortesian plate is arranged upon the same plan as that of the Fejervary Codex, evidently based upon the same theory and intended for the same purpose’. He compares the results with those of William Henry Holmes who studied the engraved shells in grave mounds in the United States (‘Art in shell of the ancient Americans’, in the Bureau’s previous Annual Report, 1883): ‘Here is in each case the four-looped circle corresponding with the four loops of the Cortesian and Fejervary plates… The four bird heads on each shell are pointed toward the left, just as on Plate 44 of the Fejervary Codex… and doubtless have the same signification in the former as in the latter - the four winds, or four winds of the four cardinal points. This... not only confirms Mr. Holmes’s suggestions [that the looped rectangular figure “may represent an inclosure, a limit, or boundary”], but also indicates that the mound builders followed the same custom in this respect as the Nahua nations, and renders it quite probable that there was more or less intercourse between the two peoples’ (p61).

For reasons that will become apparent in due course (this is the second in a series of linked chapters) we end this article by focusing specifically on the image of what William Holmes calls ‘Design from Aztec Painting’ (picture 15, centre left), included in his drawings of looped rectangle designs from engraved shells found in native American grave mounds. He proposes that these designs (four are birds’ heads, the fifth he copied from the Codex Vindobonensis/Vienna that he found in volume II of Kingsborough’s Antiquities), like the calendar images from the Fejérváry and Madrid codices, denote the ‘four winds’ or cardinal directions. He adds ‘It is not a little remarkable that a cross occupies the inclosed area in all these examples’ - he is here referring to the looped rectangle form that ‘occurs several times in the ancient Mexican manuscripts’ (2nd Annual Report of the BAE, p. 285). Though he doesn’t himself mention it, the design shown is of an ancient Mesoamerican patolli game board...

Holmes had spent two months travelling in Mexico in the spring of 1884 - he went on to write several scholarly articles on aspects of ancient Mexico starting in the 1880s - and had carried out field research in New Mexico and Arizona with Major J. W. Powell, Director of the Geological Survey and of the Bureau of American Ethnology and Matilda Stevenson (Swanton 1935: 227). All these scientists would come together in Chicago for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition: indeed Holmes, appointed Professor of Anthropic Geology at the University of Chicago, spent most of that year ‘superintending the installation of Smithsonian exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition’ (ibid p.229).
In conclusion, by 1890, thanks to the efforts of Lord Kingsborough and (subject of our next chapter) Zelia Nuttall, images of both key Mesoamerican calendar circuits and of patolli game boards were already accessible to scholars...

NOTE: For the record, of the maximum of 200 sets ever produced, I have managed to locate 92 Kingsborough sets in the USA; others reside in the UK (4), France, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, Japan and Australia.

References/sources:-
• Basbanes, Nicholas A. (1995) A Gentle Madness, Henry Holt & Co., New York
• Holmes, William Henry (1883) ‘Art in shell of the ancient Americans’, Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1880-82, Government Printing Office, Washington
• López Luján, Leonardo (2015) personal communication 2 August 2015
• Powell, J. W. (1884) ‘Introductory’, Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1881-82, Government Printing Office, Washington
• Prescott, William H. (1922 - originally written in 1843) The Conquest of Mexico, vol. 1, London Chatto & Windus
• Szewczyk, David (2015) personal communication 4 August 2015
• Staller, John E. (2015) personal communication 13 August 2015
• Stuart, David and Stuart, George (2008) Palenque - Eternal City of the Maya, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London
• Thomas, Cyrus (1884) ‘Notes on certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts’, Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1881-82, Government Printing Office, Washington
• Tomlinson, Gary (2007) The Singing of the New World, Cambridge University Press
• Tripp Evans, R. (2004) Romancing the Stone - Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination 1820-1915, University of Texas Press
• Villela, Khristaan (2015) personal communication 3 August 2015
• Ward, Ken (John Carter Brown Library) (2015) personal communication 11 August 2015